Drown All the Dogs

by Thomas Adcock

  A gust of wind disturbed the pages of my notebook. I smoothed them out and read over the information I had obtained from the Trinity student yearbooks housed in the library:

  Aidan Hockaday … Village of Tullow, County Carlow … summa cum laude’35 … Gaelic literature, modern Irish literature … member, Dublin Men’s Society of Letters …

  Not much for a two-hour effort. What a two hours.

  A person might think the librarian of Trinity College had never before met a nice respectable American cop and innocent bystander to a bit of O’Connell Street carnage dragged into his office by a security man to stand before him in chinos, sneakers and Yankees cap. I felt more than slightly reduced. And me being the son of a distinguished scholar and young litterateur, though of some decades past—and a minor celebrity in my own right, with my mug shot in there amongst news of bloody murder in that morning’s Irish Guardian to prove it.

  “Good Lord, Clooney, he might have a gun!” the librarian said. The librarian had a great booming voice that badly rattled the security man. His name was O’Dowd and he was just short of retirement age, round from a life abundant in rich food and drink, with a very small head full of red wisps of hair that roiled like ocean waves when he was agitated. He sat in a tall-back chair behind a desk cluttered with books and candy wrappers.

  Poor Clooney was the nervous type and well past retirement age. O’Dowd’s outburst made him take a lot of air down the wrong pipe, with a spasm of coughs the result.

  I pounded Clooney’s thin back, and told O’Dowd, “Gear down, I’m not carrying a piece.”

  “Gear a piece of what—?”

  Clooney made some recovery noises and flapped his arms like a wounded bird. He stepped away from me, and said in his defense, “Mr. O’Dowd, sorry sir, but I bring him to you straightaway, the thought of gunplay never once occurin’ to me.”

  “But he’s from New York!” O’Dowd fumed at Clooney, hair waving madly. “Look at that baseball cap!” Clooney cringed. O’Dowd said to me, “Isn’t that so? You’re from New York?”

  “That’s home,” I said. “Where the deer and the antelope take cover.”

  “He come into the reference department, bold as brass,” Clooney continued. “Just wanderin’ about the stacks on his own, nosin’ here and nosin’ there like some daff loon.”

  “You followed him, very good,” O’Dowd said.

  “Thank you, sir. As I’m stalkin’ him—”

  I interrupted. “I usually do carry a gun. Sometimes two or three guns,”

  Clooney looked like he very much wanted to faint. O’Dowd said to him, “Go on.” Clooney looked toward me. I nodded, and he continued.

  “As I was sayin’, Mr. O’Dowd, I’m stalkin’ this one when it suddenly crosses me mind why I’m suspicious … beyond the fact of his wanderin’ in here, I mean. There’s been Americans come in before, thinkin’ we’re only some bookshop here …”

  O’Dowd glared at me when Clooney said American.

  “But this one, sir, he’s somehow familiar to me. Then what happens but I remember why! I quick run to fetch me copy of the Guardian, and here’s what I find.” Clooney pulled the newspaper out from the side pocket of his coat and laid it out on O’Dowd’s desk, to Oliver Gunston’s splashy story and my photograph with the sidebar.

  “Aha!” said O’Dowd, raising his head from the newspaper.

  “Aha what?” I said.

  “Here you are for some nefarious purpose is what.”

  “Look at the picture, man—I’m in uniform, I’m a cop!”

  O’Dowd looked at my Yankees cap instead. Then at the rest of my clothes. He needed convincing. So I went after my NYPD shield in the side pocket of my windbreaker, and said, “I really don’t like badging my way into your library here, but—”

  “He’s going for the gun, Clooney!” O’Dowd boomed. “Do something!”

  “Oh my God, oh my God—!”

  Clooney made a yipping sound, like a dog being run over by a car, then slowly crumpled to the floor.

  “Oh my Lord,” O’Dowd said quietly, rubbing his hands. His wispy head looking like it was on fire. “Is he dead?”

  I knelt beside Clooney’s sprawled body and put a finger to his neck, which was pulsing along satisfactorily. I said, “Go get him a glass of cold water, O’Dowd.”

  O’Dowd hurried out of the room. I stroked the back of Clooney’s clenched neck and shoulders until he came around.

  “I need some air,” he said, raising himself with his arms.

  “Along with a chiropractor and a double Scotch,” I suggested. I helped him to his feet. His hands and legs shook, and he headed for the door absentmindedly. “Take a beat now, old fellow. Let’s settle you down a minute.”

  I put him in O’Dowd’s chair and found him a piece of candy. He thanked me. Then O’Dowd came crashing back into his office, followed by another man Clooney’s age or better, although far more robust, with bright blue eyes and a full beard that was snowy white and well tended.

  “That’s him, Chancellor—that’s him!” O’Dowd said, aiming a finger at me in accusatory triumph. Then he saw Clooney behind his own desk, chewing his own candy. O’Dowd turned to me, and huffed, “Here now, what’s this?”

  “He’s collecting himself after you made him fall, you jerk,” I said. “So where’s the glass of cold water I asked you to bring? And why don’t you comb your hair?”

  The chancellor turned, and said to O’Dowd, “What, you knocked old Clooney down?”

  O’Dowd laughed lightly, and said, “Now it wasn’t quite like that, sir.”

  With my hand resting on Clooney’s trembling shoulder, I said to the chancellor, “O’Dowd thinks it’s funny he’s so rough on my friend Clooney, but I don’t. Do you think it’s funny, sir?”

  “I’m sure I do not!” The chancellor turned to O’Dowd. “O’Dowd, explain yourself. There’s no gunman here as you claim. All I see is this American chap, and old Clooney there in a terrible state.”

  O’Dowd sputtered, “But that’s … that’s not the point!”

  “I’m not a gunman, sir,” I said. “Perhaps your man O’Dowd needs a doctor and a long rest?”

  “May I say something?” Clooney asked.

  “Take it easy, pal,” I said to him. Then I picked up the Irish Guardian with my picture in it and crossed the room to the two others. O’Dowd shrank from me. I extended my hand to the chancellor, and said, “There’s a little confusion here, that’s all, sir. Let’s try to clear it up, shall we?”

  “Peadar Cavanaugh,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “Chancellor Cavanaugh, my name is Neil Hockaday. I’m visiting here from New York, where I’m a police detective. Here’s my identification.” I handed Cavanaugh the newspaper, then took the gold shield out of my pocket and showed him that, too.

  “Yesterday, as you see by the paper, I was in the vicinity of a murder in O’Connell Street. Then this morning, I came into the library to do a little family research when the intrepid Clooney here recognized me and got slightly excited.”

  I gave a little salute to Clooney, who returned the gesture. O’Dowd glared at him, and Clooney got out of his chair. I turned back to Cavanaugh, and said, “Clooney invites me in here to see the librarian, next thing I know O’Dowd is hollering about guns,”

  “I wasn’t either hollering,” O’Dowd protested.

  “Yes, you was,” Clooney said, taking his advantage now. He sat back down in O’Dowd’s chair.

  Cavanaugh fingered the edge of his beard, and asked, “Tell me, Mr. Hockaday, what is the nature of your family research?”

  “My father was at school here. In the thirties, before the war.”

  “You’re Aidan Hockaday’s boy then.”

  “You knew him?”

  Cavanaugh said to O’Dowd and Clooney, “Carry on, gentlemen.” Then to me, “Come along, Mr. Hockaday, I’d like a word.”

  The chancellor turned to leave, and I followed. When I passed O’Dowd, I sha
ped my hand like a pistol and said, “Bang bang, you’re dead.” This time Clooney laughed, but not lightly.

  A man’s youth never leaves him, it only returns at inconvenient times.

  Walking now through the echoes of Trinity College corridors, in step with the authoritative stride of Chancellor Peadar Cavanaugh, this fugitive thought chased through my mind. I had heard it before. When, and from whom…?

  My youth … Father Tim.

  Not a word passed between Cavanaugh and me. Each of us was enveloped by separate thoughts. Mine were of my youth.

  I thought of despised knickers, a despised necktie and Holy Cross School. And the times some scowling nun would catch me at a boy’s mischief Inserting a red strip of cap-gun explosives into a pencil sharpener on her classroom wall, say. Sister would take me by the ear, roughly so I could hear the cartilage pop. Then swiftly and silently she would yank me down some long hallway, black and forbidding as the habit she wore. At the horrible end of this painful march was The Office, sanctum sanctorum of the merciless Father Naughton; him with his wooden paddle laced with tiny holes to insure my swats would come with the fullest aerodynamic sting.

  But now, what had I to fear of the past?

  Do you really want to know?

  We did not go to Chancellor Cavanaugh’s office for “a word,” as I imagined we might. We passed it by on our quiet long walk through a tangle of corridors finally leading out the back of the library building to the street. Outside, we turned an ivied corner of the high college wall to enter a pub called the Ould Plaid Shawl.

  “Halloo, Peadar,” the publican said to Cavanaugh as we walked in, his meaty arm raised in greeting. He stared at me, politely curious, waiting for introductions. A half-dozen pensioners were standing at the bar having themselves a fine argument about some arcane point of history, an argument as well worn as their tweeds. They had no interest in us and did not look up. The tables and the booths were empty at this hour, save for a couple of barmaids smoking cigarettes and gossiping and resting up for the lunch crowd.

  Cavanaugh did not trouble himself to explain my presence. He breezed us past the geezers, saying stiffly to the publican, “A fine morning to you, Sean. We’ll be discussing business for a time if you please. Be a good man and bring us a pot of coffee, white—and whatever my friend will have?”

  “Pint of the house ale,” I told Sean as I moved past him, feeling somehow as if a nun was clawing at my earlobe.

  Cavanaugh had us sit down at a square table in a far, dim corner of the place. There was a candle in a round glass on the table, Guinness coasters made of colored tin and an ashtray crowded with cigarette butts and wooden matches. Cavanaugh pulled a striped Rothman’s packet and a Zippo from the side pocket of his black coat.

  “Smoke?” he asked me, pushing the packet and lighter across the table. I said thanks and helped myself. I also lit the candle between us, providing enough light to make a rough study of Peadar Cavanaugh.

  The clothes he wore did not belong to the twentieth century. His suitcoat, which he left closed as he sat, was a Victorian four-button model, heavy and shapeless with age. There was a huge purple paisley silk billowing out from the breast pocket; on a younger, less substantial man this would have been effeminate. His necktie, only a shade less funereal than the suit, was largely hidden by his beard, which reached nearly halfway down his chest. Off-setting the dark solemnity of Cavanaugh’s suit was his wide ruddy face, ringed by hair as thick and snowy as his beard; and his eyes, the color of cobalt in the smudgy light of the Ould Plaid Shawl.

  Were my father’s own eyes this shade of blue? And how many times had I caught myself staring at men like Cavanaugh, and projecting my father’s black-and-white soldier photograph through time?

  “You look so mighty like him,” Cavanaugh said. Then I realized he had been studying me, too, and that I figured into his own projections. I took off my Yankees cap, knowing he wanted the fullest view of me. There was the sense of loss now in his voice. “If you were dressed proper, and for the period,” he said, “it could be Aidan sitting right there where you are.”

  “You were close then, you and my father?”

  “I was a friend, nobody could honestly call himself close to Aidan. Excepting your mother, of course.”

  “You knew her, too?”

  “Oh my, yes. Mairead was a Fitzgerald, of Bloor Street. Everybody knew the Bloor Street Fitzgeralds.”

  “And the three of you came here often?”

  “Here’s where all the great debates of the time were had. Politics was what captivated lots of us then, your mother and dad included.”

  The publican Sean arrived with coffee and my pint. I reached into my pocket for some money to pay for the round, but remembered I still had to change over my dollars. No matter, Cavanaugh covered.

  “Here now, it’s me who invited you,” he said, laying out a two-pound note. Sean dropped a few heavy coins to the table and picked up the note, then returned to the bar when it was clear to him by Cavanaugh’s look that our “business” was private.

  I stubbed out the cigarette I was not much interested in smoking anyway, and asked stupidly, “What kind of politics?”

  Laughter rolled up from Cavanaugh’s solid belly, swelled his chest and then poured out heartily from every part of his bearded face. A Macy’s Santa Claus would have been put to shame. He wiped mirthful tears from his eyes, and said, “You might well ask a fish, What kind of ocean? Politics overwhelmed us in the Great Depression, see. One brand poured over another like waves on a beach, and we were a pack of mouthy students spitting out hard and fast opinions as if they took us years to forge.”

  “Too bad you didn’t have Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream yet,” I said.

  “What of it?”

  “There’s a line in the novel spoken by the character Thomas Hudson, from his deathbed: I was just beginning to learn there toward the end. No one thing is true—it’s all true.”

  Cavanaugh lifted snowy eyebrows, then let them fall, and said, “Your father would have appreciated that. He was often saying how literature was something permanent, and politics only a pale and temporary thing.”

  “You couldn’t have thought the Depression was temporary.”

  “Well now, I do remember the famous economist John Maynard Keynes saying back then how there was only one thing ever before that was quite like the Great Depression. That was the Dark Ages of Europe, which lasted four hundred years.” Cavanaugh finished his cigarette, and lit another. “But Keynes being English, he forgot there was something else—the famine times, here in Ireland. How about another pint, lad?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m surprised you’ve got time on your hands for this.”

  Cavanaugh raised a hand up over his head and when he caught Sean’s eye he made a circling motion to indicate another round. I noticed a handkerchief tucked up one of his Victorian sleeves. He looked back at me, and said, “We’ve a different idea about time than you Americans.”

  “I notice that. Two days I’ve been here, and this is the third mention of the potato famine. That was in the 1840s. People talk about it like it was last month.”

  “It’s the Irish nature. Our only defense against a long history of falling victim to forces we don’t understand seems to be talking the bleak times to death.”

  “That can be a long death.”

  “Oh, but it’s much crueler than that. All our Irish yap prevents history from dying, as it should.”

  Sean came by with the second round. When he left, I went stupid again, and said, “But history is how we learn—”

  Cavanaugh said, as if to a dim student, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

  “And so it’s all just—nothing?”

  “No, it’s something all right. History is a pack of tricks we play upon the dead. Your father used to say that, it’s from Voltaire.”

  “I believe he was fond of poetry, too.”

  “That he was.”

>   “Did he write any verse of his own?”

  “Not that I remember,” Cavanaugh said. “What makes you ask?”

  “There’s something of his that I found recently, and it’s brought me here to Ireland as much as anything else. It’s a few lines written down, on the back of a photograph.”

  “I see.” Cavanaugh said this with abrupt disinterest, turning back a cuff to check his wristwatch. Like an impatient American, I thought; like Father Tim, and Davy Mogaill.

  “Wouldn’t you like to hear the lines?” I asked.

  Cavanaugh looked away from me. And I knew I had struck at the heart of something that maybe he wished would die. I recited: “‘Drown all the dogs,’ said the fierce young woman, ‘They killed my goose and a cat. Drown, drown in the water butt, drown all the dogs,’ said the fierce young woman.”

  He had no direct response. But then, almost nothing of our meeting in the Ould Plaid Shawl had been direct. Cavanaugh turned back to me. His eyes were runny.

  “Go home, boy,” he said.

  “I want to know.”

  Looking now as if I had struck him, he said, “You’re not like most of the Yanks who come to Ireland. And so I’m sorry for you. You won’t have the luxury of feeling your heart beat slower here, of knowing this as a great place to get yourself repaired. Do you follow me?”

  “I don’t think so …”

  “What I’m saying is, I’m bloody sorry for you that you’re so much like your dad, may God bless.”

  Remembering these things that Cavanaugh said before deciding that a chancellor’s duties suddenly called, I entered them in my notebook. I then got up from the library steps and walked back inside, where I spent thirty minutes looking through card and computer indexes to Trinity student organizations.